Despite President Donald Trump's assurances that "lifesaving" programs will be exempt from a freeze on foreign aid, personnel from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency — who effectively control the United States Agency for International Development — are still blocking assistance aimed at preventing the spread of HIV.
The consequences, one USAID worker told WIRED, can be measured in lives.
“At a minimum, 300 babies that wouldn’t have had HIV, now do,” the worker estimated.
WIRED interviewed eight current and former USAID employees and contractors, several of whom work directly on the HIV/AIDS program. They spoke anonymously for fear of retaliation and because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
DOGE has been hacking away at what Musk characterizes as inefficient, wasteful or fraudulent uses of government money — and, so far, USAID has taken the bulk of the damage, despite accounting for less than 1% of the federal budget. A group of DOGE agents are posted at USAID headquarters and are in control of its secure systems, cutting off staff access to buildings and computers.
Around 50 USAID staffers, many working on critical health missions, have suddenly been put on administrative leave.
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk said on social media Sunday. “Could [sic] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
The Trump administration granted an “emergency humanitarian waiver” to the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a global health program founded by former President George W. Bush that has saved an estimated 26 million lives since 2003 and is now funding care for 20 million people with HIV worldwide. But several USAID workers and contractors told Wired that it is still being fed to Musk's proverbial wood chipper, in large part because the people working on HIV/AIDS relief have been cut off from their work emails and agency systems.
"Your money is being unfrozen but you can’t contact the people who actually froze it," a senior official at an HIV/AIDS organization said. "There’s a bigger communication blockage that is frustrating even the efforts put in place to free up the lifesaving work."
In countries like Zambia, Nigeria, Haiti, and Mozambique, medical equipment like antiretroviral drugs for treating HIV and pre-exposure prophylaxis and condoms that can prevent it are now sitting unused in storage as the workers responsible for logistics have been placed on leave. An aid worker assigned to Haiti confirmed to WIRED that "we cannot touch the medication" and that nobody at USAID has answered their phone calls for days.
“When a baby is born, you do an early infant diagnostic test, and if it comes back positive, you can blitz them with retrovirals, but you can’t do that if you don’t have retrovirals,” another USAID worker said. “It’s an absolute disaster.”
